Night Mov-ies

“What are you thinking about the moment right before you fall asleep?”

            It is a question I have asked since I was a child.  Things are so weird in my own head, I wanted to make sure everyone else was like me or I was like them.  Of course, I found out I wasn’t … like them and to be careful of whom I asked the question and to never ever tell what went on in my mind.

            And I’m not talking about sexual fantasies.  Those fall into a different category and time frame.

            I’m talking about when the temperature is right, the covers are situated, the other (partner, lover, dog, cat or teddy bear) is quiet, the darkness lays soft, the pillows are in their correct position and the night clouds are gently passing by on the inside of your eyelids.  (Does yours change color, have lightening bolts, swirl in patterns, faces?)  Right there at that exact moment of pre-sleep.  What are you thinking of?

            Is it what happened today or what might happen tomorrow?  Is it that you should get up and check the expiration date of the milk you just ate three bowls of cereal with?  Did that burp taste a little off?  Maybe it’s that perceived insult from a coworker (who, right now, is having wild sex with her boyfriend and is definitely not lying around thinking about you) that’s floating around in there.  Or is it worry over that spot growing on the back of your right calf that you can almost see by twisting into a pretzel.  

            I tell myself stories, bedtime stories.  There are whole towns, countries, planets and universes inside my head all populated by a citizenry of characters.  There are good guys and bad guys, evil deed doers and lovers, friends and enemies, aliens and fantasy folks.  It can be any time, past, present or future.  It can be any place, real or imagined.  It can be any season or time of day or night.

            My passport into this world is to lay comfortable, close off my ‘oh my god did I lock the door, turn off the coffee pot and what was that noise’ voice, drift with those clouds and form a picture in my head.  It can be absolutely anywhere at absolutely anytime.  Next, I people it with . . . well, people.  Historical, fictional, real or ones I don’t know where they come from.  They just show up fully formed and alive (relatively speaking).  Story lines, plots and acting and reacting with each other just happens.  I don’t plot my dreams and I don’t plot these semi-dreams, day-(night)-dreams.  I step into the story all ready knowing my place and my lines but I don’t know how I all ready know that.

            Adventures in the mind are more thrilling and less dangerous than real ones, the star is always me, as the director I can take the story anywhere and they’re really not very expensive at all. 

            Sometimes, there are some really great plots or lines of dialogue or one of those ‘ah ha’ moments when I know whatever I’m seeing or doing in there, would make an incredible novel.  I know I have to wake up long enough to jot down a few words, just enough for me to remember this enormous idea for a book.  I keep a pad and pen by the bed for just these occasions (and can never interrupt my handwriting in the morning) but normally I don’t get up.  Moving will destroy the fragile bubble of the world that I am encased in.  So I convince myself I will remember and keep repeating a phrase that will be my mantra to unlock the story into a novel.  (These are the mornings when the other person in bed wakes up craving sesame chicken for breakfast and doesn’t know why.  It wasn’t real sesame seeds in there but poison disguised as sesame seeds.  Let’s hope I never chant ‘the gun is in the bottom drawer under my thongs’ or something along those lines.)  But I never remember.  I always forget in the clatter of the alarm clock.  Whole libraries of New York Times Bestseller List novels have been lost because I didn’t get up and write down the idea.

            Normally, my semi-dreaming fades into real dreaming and sleep.  Rarely, my self-told story becomes my self-told dream and I can become even more a part of my own story.  Those are great dreams unlike the normal ‘I’m in trouble with my mother for doing or not doing or not doing something right that I didn’t know I was supposed not be or to be doing right in the first place’ dreams.  I would much rather dream of rescuing my beloved from the deep dark dank cave where the baddie is holding him captive until I deliver the secret formula for … zzzzz.

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            Please note:  The above mentioned technique works well in doctors’ and dentists’ offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles and Thanksgiving dinners with the in-laws but is not the prescribed method for dealing with traffic jams or that stoplight that catches me everyday no matter how fast or slow I drive.

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The Ten Percent Predicament

I was going to call this chapter ‘Writer’s Block’ or ‘Author’s Arrest’ (no, not that kind of arrest) or ‘Novelist’s Snag’ but that doesn’t accurately describe my problem.  Then I considered ‘The Seven-Percent Solution’ but the math didn’t work (big surprise) and Nicholas Meyer did a better job than I ever will.  My problem would be better illustrated as ‘Hopping Hack’.

            I get one of those inspired inspirations and start out all gangbusters (wonder what that phrase really means?) on a book.  Dialogues, plots, scenes and plot twists all pour off my fingers onto the keyboard to be projected on the computer screen.  But eventually, the high fades and my fingers start to hesitate and my brain slows down (or someone interrupts me).

            There comes a point in capturing the essence of a new project where you just can’t say ‘female lead’, ‘male lead’ and ‘humorous sidekick’ anymore.  You have to stop and figure out what these peoples’ names and back stories are.  Once you have that, you have to give them a place to do whatever it is they’re doing in and then you have to decide if it’s going to be a fictional place or a real place.  If it’s a real place, then you have to stop and do research on wherever you placed them.  If it’s a fictional place, you have to stop and make it up in your head and on paper (well, screen).  And what do they look like?  What age group?  (As I get older, I find it harder to write younger but that means pretty soon all my characters will be in wheelchairs (oh wait, some are) … all my characters will be old and fat and gray just like me.)  What do they do for a living?  I have to figure out all the assorted things that make up a human being for each person.

            Meanwhile, the characters are sitting around twiddling their thumbs (or each others) or they wander off, get into trouble and show up in other stories.  And I’m bogged down in a mire of baby name books and Internet research until … ah ha … the light goes off again as I read a story about a guy who found undeveloped film from 1960’s in his attic left by some previous owner and he took it to the photo shop to see if they could do anything with it and they found pictures of … oh wow, that would make a really great story so I open a new file and start again.

            That’s where the ten percent comes in.  I have folders inside of folders that have the first thirty to fifty pages (I’m on a roll here and am not stopping to do the math) of really great stories in them.  It’s not that the fire goes out; it’s that the fire jumps the river of my thought stream and rekindles somewhere else.  So I end up hopping back and forth between ideas and hacking down the brush with a machete so I don’t end up with a forest fire and burn out before my time.

            I know I have to stop, dig a trench and work on just one project at a time until I finish it or I’m never going to finish anything ever again.  My career will die.  I will die and they’ll find my body buried in an avalanche of paper but finishing a project seems like an overwhelming amount of words (80,000) to find.  And trust me, I know from experience there are long stretches of oh-my-god-this-is-really-boring-writing and why-why-did-I-ever-want-to-be-a-writer out there waiting on me. 

I think I’ll try capturing all the exciting scenes and sex scenes and action scenes first, thinking I’ll go back and fill in the boring stuff later and the more fun stuff I write the less fill in there will be.  But this method produces time warps that tangle and weave, vortexes that let other things enter the story and some really great chapters that fit absolutely nowhere in any book (unless I start a whole new book around them).  I print and cut and paste and edit and sort until the original germ of the idea has died along with my inspiration and energy.  I give up and go play computer games until suddenly my brain sparks and I can see how it all goes together (even the boring stuff) and I race to get it all down before the fire dies.

Looking back on this chapter, I’ve discovered the ten percent is the time I spend writing, the eighty percent is the time I spend worrying about or planning to write (I left ten percent free for non-important stuff like job, kids, chores).  If I could switch the writing percentage with the worrying and planning time, I could fill library shelves with the books (or flash drives with ebooks).  I’ll bet if I go look, I can find an article on the Internet on how to do just that.                      

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Note:  I looked up gangbusters.  Together as one word, it means law enforcement that breaks up organized criminal groups.  But separated as in Gang Busters© it was a radio show, television show and movie about criminal cases.

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